Speaking on a commentary track for his film Knowing (Summit Entertainment, $27 DVD, $35 Blu-ray), director Alex Proyas (Dark City;I, Robot) says his favorite commentary track is one featuring a conversation between Martin Scorsese and the late Michael Powell. (The DVD, which he never names, is Criterion Collection's Black Narcissus.)

That explains why an unidentified interviewer joins Proyas on the Knowing track, prodding him with questions about the making of the movie. The director isn't an entirely willing interview subject, declining, for example, to say whether he was consciously referencing Sept. 11 with some of the disaster imagery (he obviously was) or trying to capitalize on the popularity of Christian-themed apocalyptic fiction (once again, yes).

Proyas also rejects his interviewer's Christian reading of Knowing's ending, saying he left it open-ended to allow for personal interpretations (but not, apparently, ones with which he disagrees).

Essentially a cross between The Rapture and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the movie stars Nicolas Cage as an M.I.T. professor who believes a number-covered paper unearthed in a time capsule at his son's school accurately predicted countless past disasters -- and foretells several more in the coming few days.

Shot on digital cameras, Knowing looks and sounds fantastic in its Blu-ray incarnation, which helps keep your finger off the eject button when the story loses its pull about an hour in. The closer Knowing gets to its revelatory finale, the less interesting it becomes.

No doubt sensing that, the director says he used the skeptical Cage character's gradual acceptance of the bizarre events to bring the audience along. He only half-succeeds, though.

Other extras: a 13-minute making-of featurette, Knowing All, that focuses on a terrifying plane crash scene and the 17-minute Visions of the Apocalypse, in which scientists discuss the inevitable end of life on Earth when the sun dies in about 4.5 billion years. Happy existential crisis!

`THE UNBORN'

Can someone please call a timeout on horror movies in which the protagonist sees things no one else does and everyone thinks he/she is crazy? It's boring. In The Unborn (Universal Home Entertainment, $30 DVD, $40 Blu-ray) it's Casey (Odette Yustman) who is plagued by apparitions of a creepy little boy with freakishly large eyes -- on the street, in the middle of a crowded dance floor, even inside her medicine cabinet.

Written and directed by David S. Goyer (one of the writers on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight), The Unborn surrounds Yustman with an impressive supporting cast (Gary Oldman, Jane Alexander, Carla Gugino, The Wire's Idris Elba) as it tries to uncover the reason for her progressively more grotesque and aggressive visions.

Goyer pulls off an effective scare here and there, and tries to take the story in a new (for horror pictures) direction involving Kabbalah, Auschwitz and what I believe to be the movies' first Jewish exorcism. But none of this keeps The Unborn from feeling like more of the same-old, which explains why the DVD and Blu-ray have been dumped onto store shelves with no extras aside from six minutes of superfluous deleted scenes and an ''unrated'' version that is a whopping 50 seconds longer than the PG-13 theatrical cut.

`LONELY ARE

THE BRAVE'

Among the initial offerings from Universal Studios' new Universal Backlot Series (''an ongoing collection of rare gems, overlooked groundbreaking work and films of historical and cultural importance'') is the 1962 Kirk Douglas vehicle Lonely are the Brave ($20, DVD), sometimes referred to by fans as the ``original First Blood.''

There are certain similarities between John Rambo and Jack Burns (Douglas), a modern-day cowboy who discovers the world no longer has any use for him and ends up fleeing from the law through the wilderness, where he proves elusive prey. Poised to be rediscovered as one of Douglas' finest hours, the black-and-white Cinemascope film co-stars Walter Matthau as the reluctant lawman on his trail and a shockingly young Gena Rowlands as The One Who Got Away.

The movie is accompanied by a 20-minute featurette, A Tribute, in which Douglas calls the film one of his proudest achievements (he wanted to call it The Last Cowboy) and Steven Spielberg says that though he wasn't much impressed by the film as a child, he now ranks it among his favorites.

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